The networked computing environment (e.g., cloud computing environment) is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further enhanced by one or more additional abstraction layers (e.g., a cloud layer), thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical computing engines, servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices, among others.
Cloud computing models provide a convenient tool for application hosting. Challenges may exist, however, in applying cloud computing models to database architectures because many databases hosted in cloud environments follow a tabular database model. That is, a traditional relational database model may not be applicable in designing an application that is to be hosted in a cloud environment. Accordingly, it often falls upon a user/customer to comprehend the concepts involved with a tabular database format. As such, conversion from a relational database format to a tabular database format is often performed manually, which can be time consuming and prone to error.